A window briefly opens, wafting a dust-cloud of light along the dark marble lines. The statues here with fewer flaws, or no flaws at all, are from a later time, the imperial age when Greek ideals of beauty were preferred, when the youthful body became more important than the characterful face. Local sculptors had then to carve what the conquerors could not bring back from Greece itself. There were copies made of ancient masterpieces and gradual adaptations to meet the needs of this different market – with a sharply varying eye on quality and only at prices that careful buyers were prepared to pay.
In every phase of fashion most of the artists of Rome originated far away from Rome. Sculptors from other places carved the Romans’ statues just as they wrote the Romans’ poems. They produced what was wanted. It was to become firmly fixed in the city’s founding mythology that only other peoples breathed life into bronze and stone. Roman men and women had altogether different duties.
The most famous image of Spartacus before the age of the movies, the one most commonly seen on books and postcards, was inspired by this later classical style. It came from the chisel of a nineteenth-century French sculptor, six foot six inches of the whitest Carrara marble, a hero made to be seen not in death but at the bright moment of his first freedom. This naked Greek, naked in his best Greek pose, is leaning back in anticipation of his glories to come, with his hands still crossed in the shape of the straitjacket of chains he has cast away.
Its creator, Denis Foyatier, was a fortunate man in finding his own small place on the Spartacus Road. He completed his statue just at the right time, in 1830, when a more liberal imperial regime was taking over in France. His seriously thoughtful freed slave was just the sort of soft white symbol required. Foyatier had conceived his glowing contribution to garden furnishings, and even carved much of the rock, long before Louis-Philippe’s coup. But the romance of the King’s July Monarchy made the work an instant masterpiece, neither the first nor the last time at which Spartacus has swayed to the demands of changing times.
My clerical friend returns filled with wine, wakefulness and local pride that the museum ever opened and that his visitor is still here. Spartacus? His black eyes wrinkle like drying olives. He frowns knowingly before a broken limb that could be a Hercules or a sea-monster. He measures its circumference as though some deep secret lay in the answer. He then says suddenly that, if we are thinking of the hours before the break-out from Capua, Foyatier’s nakedness may be just about right, though not, he whispers with distaste, the whiteness nor the cleanliness nor even the uprightness of his statue.
This priest knows about Spartacus: ‘the killer would have smelt like a rat’. His torso would have been striped like the back of a game bird and ticked and crossed like a stone column of tax accounts. The cells that he has seen under the local amphitheatres do not show many spaces where a tall man could stand. The Frenchman’s choice of physique was ‘probably right’. Spartacus was a big man, a slave from the east, selected for strength, schooled in violence and probably not much more. He would have been a closely confined prisoner both in Capua and before, precisely because of his physical power, a more knotted, muscled, scar-corrugated power than Foyatier shows. He was one of those men who thrive and become a hard man among prison hard men.
‘Immense strength’ was an accolade not given lightly in the ancient world. ‘Muscle’ was important for an owner of men: slavery was the energy industry of its time. In prison life the same muscle meant the power to press the blood out of an adversary’s arm or neck; it meant the power to enforce will and to will the force of others. The French sculptor of the Romantic age captured too the sense of self-discipline, the sort that other strong men recognise as necessary sometimes even though they lack it themselves, the ability to focus strength and be one of those men who thrive in leadership, prisms able to direct the scattered beams of others into a single hot line.
Romantic admirers of Spartacus inspired Foyatier to make him more like an Athenian Greek than a Thracian one, two types which were very different in ancient eyes. Athenians were philosophers and artists, with a potential Socrates or stupendous vase-painter at their every street corner. Spartacus came from northern Greek tribes in Thrace, people whom the Romans, echoing local neighbours as well as their own experience, recognised as the most savage in the world.
A good gladiator for a games promoter had to be a ‘barbarian’s barbarian’, a title something like our modern respect for the ‘professional’s professional’, the ‘criminal’s criminal’. He could be and would be the object of fascinated observation – but only if he were firmly in his place. If Spartacus had been loose tonight in this room full of thugs and molls in Formia, even the most military Roman would have been hiding behind the pillars, calling out the guard. My man in Catholic black has no doubts about that. Spartacus was a trained assassin, master of the stabbing sword, the push to the throat, the rip of the face. If he had not been a slave, an object of sympathy now, we could call him a professional killer, with the certain respect we allow for that group too.
Spartacus was one of many. He was never marked out by the Romans for anything very special. Capuan gladiator shows in 73 BC were mere scraps in dustbowls when compared to the spectaculars that were commoner later and the more remembered ever since. There might already have been ‘rare wild beasts’ on the play-bill that Spartacus would miss by his escape. There might not. Many in the audience would hardly have expected or seen much difference between Spartacus and a beast.
There was also a ‘sophisticated set’ in the city of Capua, some of whom watched the gladiators in training and looked forward to the chance of being there for the kill, for the moment when a dying man’s eyes became a dead man’s. This was not mere sadism but a kind of therapy. The Romans cared deeply how they died, how they might look to others when they looked out themselves for the last time. But could anyone ever properly imagine himself when dying turned to death? It was very hard. The more one thought about it the harder it became. To watch others die was a training for the imagination, important training because a Roman man’s whole life depended on others seeing his death well.
It is becoming darker now in the Formia museum. The ropes are gradually falling in front of the galleries so that only one of these ancient party rooms is now open, the place of the minor tradesmen, the lesser men and women of the old town of Mamurra, the types with the most to lose in a slave revolt, the almost prosperous, the always vulnerable. Time is nearly up. The curators of these antiquities, chatting softly beside their predatory sea-snake, cluck-cluck as though the very chastity of their marble Roman matrons might be at risk before the English intruder. It is as well he has a priest to keep an eye on him.
We are guessing further and faster now – whether Spartacus had the square face and red hair of the Celtic upper class in Thrace or the longer facial features of the lesser locals, lupine and slow. Did that matter? However smoothly his image has emerged in the minds of a modern priest, sympathetic ancient Greeks and a mildly liberal Frenchman of the 1820s, Spartacus himself would have been the most dangerous of animals in this room beside the Appian Way.
The gladiator had once had, and maybe in 73 BC possessed still – his Dionysiac priestess wife who had seen snakes twisted around his head, a sure sign of something mysterious to any Roman eyes who cared to see such things. Spartacus carried all manner of alien marks from the east. Whether these were marks of very good or very ill fortune, even the best Greek texts are unclear. It depended on who was copying them down.
The ropes close the last room. Outside in the street, there is a choice of tours to two local tombs. The first, in a bright-green taxi, is to that of Munatius Plancus, a military adventurer who backed almost every side in the Republican civil wars but won his immortality in a drinking poem by Horace. The second, in a minibus, is to that attributed to one of many politicians betrayed by Plancus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, a man who won his enduring reputation from literary works of his own.
Cicero had the bol
dness once to compare his enemy Mark Antony to Spartacus, a fatal enmity as it proved. But neither Cicero’s tomb nor that of Plancus is a necessary diversion on this road. There is instead a golden choice of wine in the bars here, both for the off-duty churchman and for his dinner companion who, following the reporter’s discipline he long ago set for himself, has first to write down these notes on the day.
Piazza Orazio Flacco, Benevento
The priest said that he could meet me again in this next town along the Appian Way. Benevento’s Leproso Bridge is the most visible relic here of Spartacus’ time, lizard-like arches of low-lying stone and long grass. The only living things in the Piazza Orazio are feral cats, prowling through the polythene sheets of long-absent archaeologists. When Horace came to Beneventum on his journey to Brundisium he complained of getting nothing to eat but burnt thrushes from a burning kitchen. This abandoned piazza of deep empty pits, corrugated iron barricades and peeling dance-school posters is the town’s appropriate revenge.
My new friend is comfortable talking about Spartacus, a man whom he has somehow accepted into his own faith. There are certain pagans whom followers of Jesus Christ have long seen as honorary Christians. Spartacus finally won his place thanks to Kirk Douglas and the Hollywood money men. There was big box-office appeal in a saintly rebel who had lived just too early to be a saint. Statius had won the accolade somewhat earlier and was thus available to lead his Renaissance admirer Dante along paths through Paradise.
Horace has not been so blessed by the Church, being no sort of freedom fighter and a religious sceptic too. But before the black-eyed priest begins his explanation of all this he wants to know more about the traveller he is talking to. He does not care about newspapers or politics, about Britain or the possibilities of my notebook becoming a more permanent book. He believes in origins. Very precisely he wants to know who my father was, where I come from. He is most specific. He pauses aggressively for my reply. He throws a lump of wood at the cats and taps a long white finger on the wall while they scatter into the ditches.
Most of what we know about Horace, he begins again, comes from the poet’s tribute to his father, the good-hearted, hard-working, sometime enslaved businessman from Venusia. Eduard Fraenkel used to say the same, more severely, with the threat that any student who could not be bothered to read Horace’s sixth satire (shame on the distracted children of the 1960s) should not bother with Horace at all.
Much of our knowledge of Statius comes in the same way, an obituary poem to the man who had taught him all the Greek tricks he knew, whom he begged to come back to him in his dreams. Was my own father dead? When was he born? What was his religion? What did his obituaries say? The thirsty questioner senses another imminent pause and snaps, as though taking hurried confessions in a disaster zone, that I will be happier when I have answered.
So I do. W. M. Stothard was born in 1925 in the flat lands where Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire meet. When he died of cancer in 1997 there was no obituary in the newspapers. He was not quite good enough at cricket or cards, although he played both well when he was young. He was baptised as a Methodist and named after the Yorkshire cricketing hero Wilfred Rhodes; but he quickly lost both the Christianity and the name. For seventy years, from his mining-village birthplace to the bars of Royal Marines and ministries of defence, he answered to the name Max. A man of his age might reasonably have booked his space on the obituaries page during the war. My father set out for war when he was supposed to have been setting out as a student. He joined the Royal Navy despite all his family’s efforts to keep him at home. But he sailed away to West Africa on a ship called HMS Aberdeen. He bought red-leather knife cases and postcards of Dakar’s six-domed cathedral and never fired a hostile shot except at a basking shark. He was lucky, he said.
When he was not shooting fish or trading cans for trinkets, he studied the young science of radar, watching the many curious ways that waves behave in the air above the sea, turning solid things into numbers. He was not a radar pioneer in the sense that obituary writers would require. He was one of thousands who fiddled with diodes, quartz and wire to make radar work. That was how he spent most of the rest of his life.
He returned to England when the war was won and took a place at Nottingham University. He batted and bowled and played bridge and studied physics. He had a striped blue-green-yellow blazer which he cheerfully bequeathed to me and which made it easier for my friends to recognise me at Oxford in the 1970s in the dark. He had a brain that other engineers described as Rolls-Royce. It was powerful but he did not like to test it beyond a purr. In 1950, the year before I was born, he joined the Marconi Company at its research laboratory in Great Baddow, Essex, on a salary of £340 per year. He worked on many and various half-forgotten, half-successful, mostly never needed air-defence systems that protected British skies during the Cold War. He reasoned through his problems in an armchair at home, spreading files marked ‘Secret’ like a fisherman’s nets. He preferred to solve technical glitches in series not in parallel. He found solutions singly. He hated to stress the machinery of his mind.
Later he became a manager and a salesman whom, in my own too simple student days, I would call an arms salesman. I accused him of complicity in the death industry and he was characteristically patient about that. He travelled many roads. He came to know thousands of fellows in the science of spotting fast-moving objects in the sky. He had space in his purring life for hundreds to be his friend. But he long did not seek the advancement that an obituary demands; and latterly, when he sought it, he did not find it.
He sometimes misunderstood people. He liked to see them as electro-machinery, as fundamentally capable of simple, selfless working. He was closed to the communications of religion or art. His favourite picture, his own spectacular, was a photograph of an oil-production platform being towed through a fiord. He listened to no music. He was especially offended by the violin and the soprano voice. His passions were for moving parts, moving balls, jet-streams in the skies over air shows. Other minds were not his pasture.
He was a pleasure-seeking materialist whose pleasures were not taken in excess and whose materialism was only a means of science. If his cancer pains brought him pictures of any past, he never mentioned them. I doubt that they did. He claimed that he had never had a dream until the diamorphine nights that kindly killed him. He had no fear of anything unknown.
Thirty years ago, when I was setting off for Oxford to study Latin and Greek, he gave me his own father’s copy of the second half of Virgil’s Aeneid. The name B. Stothard, in a firm, now faded, script, still sits inside the flyleaf. Max had no idea why that Virgil had been bought or why it had survived. It was one of only five books in our house on Great Baddow’s Rothmans estate, a freshly concreted field where all the radar engineers lived in a Marconi community of algebra and graph-paper. My father did not much care for Latin or for my studying it. But he never tried to stop me. He never closed a gate. He could easily have stopped me being here now. Without a mind full of antiquity I would not have been in Horace Square with a frowning, olive-eyed priest who continues to ask questions, more satisfied now with some small sense of my paternity, before giving his farewell guidance for the true beginning of the Spartacus Road.
III
CAPUA to ACERRA
Via Domenico Russo, Santa Maria Capua Vetere
‘Spartacus went that way,’ says the older man at the wax-papered card-table, pointing from the ticket-kiosk into town, away from the ancient amphitheatre towards the unlit neon signs for church-approved lingerie, twenty-four-hour diesel and a play-site. He gesticulates in a timeless animation, as though the famed escape from Capua has only just occurred – and as if the police and a sole reporter had only just arrived on the scene, late (what could one expect?) but not too late.
His younger colleague disagrees, waving a thin finger in the opposite direction, back through the arches of the ruined arena and up to the hill he calls Tifata. From the way that he speaks,
mechanically with a passionless level tone, it seems that he always disagrees; and that these two men, whether their subject is the latest game in town or the oldest one, will always see their hands a different way.
From the rest of the card-players in Scuba Club caps and soft workmen’s shirts, flipping aces beside the ticket-booth, there is no response at all to the question that has been asked by two studious Koreans, one man, one woman, the man with a large logo for his national airline on his shiny black plastic briefcase, the woman with a paper bag full of papers in her hands. How had some seventy gladiators, led by Spartacus and two others, broken away from the training school of Lentulus Batiatus?
Today this is a place of discount stores and graffiti. It has been repopulated many times since it was abandoned in the early Middle Ages. But it still feels like a temporary camp, lightly ruled by legitimate authorities, heavily controlled by the Camorra and other criminal gangs. The name of Spartacus is most commonly used – and with no affection at all – as police code for a seven-year investigation into a Capuan gang of contract killers, protection racketeers and buriers of illegal toxic waste. In 73 BC this was the second city of the super-power of the West. It takes some energetic imagination to begin the task of understanding that – more energy than the sun allows.
The Spartacus Road Page 6